A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [151]
He hoped the rest of the network still functioned.
Davlin was neither a fool nor a coward. He knew that he alone must find a solution. Unless Rlinda Kett came after him—and he didn’t think the merchant woman would risk it—no one would ever find him here. Without food or water, he could not survive for long.
He finally summoned his nerve and chose a coordinate tile at random, memorized the design, and pressed it. When the hazy transportal activated, he stepped through to another place.
He drew a breath before he even opened his eyes. Different. The air smelled spoiled and dry—but breathable, again. These ruins were covered with dust that had collected over millennia. The walls had fallen. The sky was an angry, leprous green. It was a miracle the trapezoidal stone window still functioned here.
Obviously not the right place.
A bloodcurdling cry sliced through the air, growing louder, and he saw black creatures circling overhead. Poisonous-looking insects crawled over the broken walls. Two fist-size beetles clacked their wings and took flight toward him, buzzing in the air like heavy bumblebees.
With fewer reservations this time, Davlin activated the transportal, choosing a different coordinate tile, and stepped through the shimmering flat stone before the beetles could come after him…
He found nothing useful in the next place, either, a totally empty Klikiss world that showed no sign of human investigation—perhaps a planet never mapped or surveyed, not even by Ildirans. The ruins were intact, the structures undisturbed. He called out at the top of his lungs, but once more received no answer.
And so he jumped through the transportal again and again, growing hungrier each time. He kept careful records of each coordinate design, hoping to compile some sort of map. Had Margaret Colicos done the same thing, desperately wandering from one planet to the next, never finding her way back?
The sixth journey brought him to a hot, arid place that looked quite familiar. He was sure he had seen images of it in the briefing materials Basil had sent. Davlin discovered the remnants of a Terran university excavation camp. Some of the buildings were cordoned off. Chalk marks and carefully dissected strata in the dust and mud showed where teams had attempted to make sense of the abandoned city. Human marks.
With a growling stomach and uncertain optimism, he walked through the site, finding a garbage dump and a few forgotten odds and ends. But no people. The name of the planet, as he recalled, was Pym, a well-known Klikiss site. In better times and with open space travel, this could have become a huge excavation or even a tourist destination, but now Pym was empty.
With a swell of relief, though, Davlin found an automated water pump that had been shut down. An hour’s tinkering got it functioning again, and soon fresh, cold water from a deep aquifer spilled out, a glorious treasure that he gulped with great pleasure. He splashed his face, then ran the water over his dark hair and skin, cooling his hands, soaking his shirt. He was also overjoyed to find some abandoned supplies in a storage cache inside one of the buildings; the stale but wondrous concentrated camp food revitalized him.
However, even knowing that he was on Pym gave him no better clue as to how he could get home. The scraps of concentrated food would last only a day or two. No communications equipment had been left behind. He supposed if he did manage to send an emergency signal, Basil Wenceslas just might come to retrieve him—but without a green priest, any message would take months or more to cross open space before there was a chance of someone intercepting it.
Davlin leaned back in the gathering night, exhausted. But for the first time in at least two stressful days—different planets and time zones made it difficult to keep track of how long he’d been gone—he